Burkhan Khaldun was the sacred place where Genghis Khan went to pray to the sky god
Tengri before embarking on his campaign to unite the Mongols and other
steppe peoples. After the rise of the
Mongol Empire, it then became known as
Ikh Khorig, or the Great Taboo, with only the Mongol royal family, or golden family, being permitted entry to the area. In all, a 240 square-kilometre area was sealed off by the Mongols, with trespassing being punishable by death. Even in the Soviet era, the area remained restricted out of fear that the mountain could once again become a site of pilgrimage or a focus for Mongol national identity. The Ikh Khorig has also been reported as being traditionally guarded by an Uriankhai tribe called the
Darkhad that were exempted by the Mongols from taxes and military service. Such guarding of an imperial grave site "undermines the folkloric suggestion that the soldiers who witnessed the funeral were executed".
Expeditions and investigations In 1920, the French diplomat
Saint-John Perse led an unrelated expedition through Mongolia with Chinese Post general director,
Henri Picard Destelan and Dr. Jean-Augustin Bussière, in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. In 2001, a joint American-Mongolian expedition, organized by a retired Chicago commodity trader Maury Kravitz and assisted by Dr. D. Bazargur of the Genghis Khan Geo-Historical Expedition, found a walled burial ground on a hillside near the town of
Batshireet. The location, 200 miles to the east-northeast of
Ulaanbaatar near the
Onon River in the foothills of the
Khentii Mountains, was close to both Genghis Khan's presumed birthplace and the site where he announced himself as the universal ruler of the Mongols. The site contained at least 20 unopened tombs for high-status individuals. An earlier Japanese expedition had visited the site in the 1990s, On 6 October 2004, Genghis Khan's palace was discovered 150 miles east of the Mongolian capital,
Ulaanbaatar, leading to academic speculation that his burial site could alternatively be located nearby. In January 2015, Dr Albert Yu-Min Lin from the
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the
University of California, San Diego set up a project asking anyone interested to tag potential sites of the burial through images taken from space. The project resulted in the publication of a paper in the journal
Public Library of Science One that claimed to have identified 55 archaeological sites that could potentially be the final resting place of Genghis Khan. In 2015 and 2016, two expeditions led by French archaeologist Pierre-Henri Giscard, a specialist in Mongolian archaeology, and Raphaël Hautefort, a specialist in scientific imaging, around the
Khentii mountains (North East of Mongolia) support the theory of a
tumulus at the top of the
Burkhan Khaldun mountain. Their non-invasive analysis, carried out with drones, showed that the -long tumulus is of human origin and probably built on the model of the Chinese imperial tombs present in Xi'an. In addition, the expedition noted that the mound was still the subject of religious rites and pilgrimages of the surrounding population. The expedition did not give rise to any scientific publication by Pierre-Henri Giscard because it was made without authorization, and without informing local authorities, as access to the area around Burkhan Khaldun remains strictly controlled by the Mongolian government due to the sacredness of the area for the local population. ==In popular culture==